Transportation Blog

Category Archives: Rodger Jones

An American Airlines flights taxis in the background as a DART Orange Line train pulls in to the new station Monday, Aug. 18, 2014 at Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport. (AP Photo/The Dallas Morning News, G.J. McCarthy)

A couple of women squeezed on my southbound DART train this morning pulling rollaway suitcases behind them. As the rest of us were headed to work, these two were on their way to board a plane at DFW’s Terminal A. I’d say they looked happier than the others on the train.

The thought occurred: With the airport service now more than two months old, time for a ridership update.

I emailed DART’s Morgan Lyons this morning, and here’s what he said back:

“It’s a little over 1,000 a day last I heard. The projection was 1,200 after a year, so we’re happy with the way it has developed.”

Point of clarification: DART counts passengers as they get ON the train. These two DFW-bound passengers were counted when they boarded at Lovers Lane, and that’s it.

If they take a taxi or get a ride back home, their use of DART to reach the airport will not be reflected in DART’s passenger count. I suppose it might balance out, but it might not, depending on people’s routines.

And this further from Morgan:

“We’re seeing lots of employees, which is good. We’re also seeing a lot of what you reported, people a good distance from the airport riding the train with luggage.”

The early guess from DART chief Gary Thomas and others was that most passengers on the Orange Line to the airport would be workers. With 60,000 on-site workers, the airport is a huge employment center unto itself — about half the workforce of downtown.

The Central Japan Railway's Shinkansen N700. A later model of the electrified bullet train is proposed for service between Dallas and Houston.

The Federal Railroad Administration and TxDOT are conducting the first public meeting this evening on the private Texas Central High-Speed Railway’s plan for a Dallas-Houston bullet train. This newspaper is an editorial fan of the project.

If you go on the FRA’s website to look through project materials, you can see potential routes the service could take between the two cities. The company aims to use lots of existing rights of way, be it the state’s, another railroad company’s or a utility company’s. The train would be electrified and run along elevated tracks.

What you don’t see on the FRA website is detail on possible routes into and within downtown Dallas — or where the train station might be. Those details will be divulged later today at the FRA/TxDOT meeting, called a “scoping” meeting. I inquired of Texas Central VP Travis Kelly, and he told me this, via email:

The presentation to be given by the agencies tonight will show areas where station locations have been identified, both in Dallas and in Houston. The evaluation criteria and scoring matrix that resulted in the downselect from many alternatives to two will also be shown and spoken to. …

The agencies may wait until after the final scoping meeting to make these materials available on their website.

If you’re curious about “scoping” this out, I may see you tonight at the Infomart.

How’s the DART service to D/FW Airport doing so far, now completing its third week?

I asked DART spokesman Morgan Lyons. He sent me this:

We are still observing the ridership but early indications are good. We’re seeing good passenger loads to and from the station. Probably another month or so before we have solid information but we are pleased with the first couple of weeks.

Any hard figures? I asked. Morgan said:

We are still conducting passenger counts and we are two weeks into operation. Early counts suggest we are a little more than halfway toward our first year projection of 1,200 daily riders.

I have one more bit of input. A couple of editors at my newspaper were among those airline passengers who jumped at the chance to take DART out to D/FW.

Both had rides to the DART station nearest their homes. Both planned lots of extra time, since the train takes longer than the typical drive — like the 56-minute train trip my boss/editor had to D/FW from the Pearl Station downtown. She left her place at 11:55 a.m. for a 3:45 flight. She got to the gate two hours early and emailed me about finding a bar nearby.

The other DMN-er lives not too far from me, in Richardson, and uses the same station as I do, the Arapaho Station. It’s an 82-minute DART trip to D/FW from there.

I was interested in this editor’s calculus in choosing DART over, say, a taxi or Uber. Is the money worth it for the time saved? Her view was that the time factor was not all that greater with DART, considering the cushion you need for driving to D/FW because of traffic concerns. If you get a friend to drive you to the airport, you’re asking someone to burn 90 minutes or so, plus gasoline. If you drive yourself and park out there, you have to build in more time to get from lot to terminal, and then there’s the cost of parking.

To go via DART, this editor left her house at 6:20 for a 9:30 a.m. flight and got to Terminal A at 8 — giving her 90 minutes to spare.

Here’s the crazy thing: She was the only one who got off the train at DART’s Terminal A station. She said she looked up and down the rail cars and station platform, and not one other person disembarked.

I was surprised, for two reasons:

1) About 60,000 people work at D/FW. That includes airline workers, concessions employees, parking people, security personnel, folks with badges and everything. With all those thousands punching the clock there, you’d think one or two might have been heading there at 8 a.m. from the 13-city DART service area. Strange.

2) The sheer volume of outgoing local passengers, about 30,000 a day. (That’s based on 31 million enplanements a year, with 35 percent of fliers with local origination/destination — all figures provided by David Magana, D/FW’s PIO. Blame me, not him, for any bad math.)

Not all of those tens of thousands of fliers come from the Dallas side of the airport, but still. A pile of them do.

I hope DART reaches and exceeds 1,200 passengers a day at D/FW. I’d like to think the line to the airport was worth the civic investment. It makes sense, on the face of it. But we’re a car-loving metro area, and it’s rare that I see a DART park-n-ride approaching half full on my way to work each day.

Now comes one of the most familiar voices in Western swing music to lend his baritone to the pro-Prop 1 campaign. Here’s a video cut by Asleep at the Wheel’s Ray Benson. What better song to overlay the message than “Miles and Miles of Texas.”

The YouTube was released by pro-Prop 1 group Infrastructure Texas. Excerpt from its news release:

“I’ve seen miles and miles of Texas during my career. It’s been a long, pleasant and rewarding ride,” Benson said. “But that ride is getting longer and more frustrating because of the horrible traffic congestion – especially in the bigger Texas communities.

“Texans will get the chance to do something about our traffic gridlock by supporting Prop 1 in the November election. This new Prop 1 video was a fun way to make an important statement,” Benson said.

Another excerpt:

Most Texans are unaware of the state’s critical transportation funding needs, said Rep. Joe Pickett, D-El Paso, chairman of the House Select Committee on Transportation Funding.

“I don’t know where the name ‘Asleep at the Wheel’ came from, but it certainly fits today, given the fact that being stuck in traffic for a long time actually can cause people to be “Asleep at the wheel,” Pickett said.

“Texans see all the road construction and may think it will never end. Wrong. Construction today is being financed with borrowed money, which will run out over the next year or two,” Pickett said. “But it will take us nearly 20 years to pay it off – about $1 billion per year. Prop 1 will put us back on the road again toward becoming a pay-as-you-go state. It’s the first step on a longer journey.”

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A few regular readers tell me they’re interested in the small print of DART’s rail ridership numbers. They’ve reminded me that I used to post them from time to time, and they want an update.

OK. Here you go. See the chart at right.
There is a pile of caveats, though.

There was a time when watching DART’s ridership gains or losses was as simple as remembering two colors: Red and Blue. And it was possible to add up all the stations of each line and compare ridership to years past.

Then these things happened to complicate comparisons:

1) DART added its Orange and Green lines.
2) During rush hours, every other train headed north and south on Red Line tracks (and on part of Green Line tracks) are, in fact Orange.
3) DART changed its method of counting from manual to automated toward the end of 2012. That produced an immediate increase in official ridership numbers, at the time.

In looking at the ridership numbers keep in mind that they don’t represent human beings. Instead, they represent “trips.” You can think of them as boardings.

Look at the bottom of the chart, at the totals. The March total of 95,904 means about that many people got on. Since I get on the train twice in my typical commute, I’m typically counted twice. This morning I’d have been counted three times (and there are lots of us), since I got off the Orange at Cityplace and got on a Blue. One rider, two “trips” counted. The 95,904 trips in March may have been less than 40,000 daily commuters.

Also, don’t look at the October numbers, since they factor in a State Fair bulge.

The best way I know how to compare today’s ridership numbers with those of years past is to compare ridership by station. I’ve kept station-by-station numbers going back to 2004, when the first phases of the Red and Blue were more or less built out.

To compare then and now, I dismissed 2004 and 2005 as starter years and focused on 2006. Take a look at the three months from the spring of 2006 that I’ve excerpted here. I focus on the Red Line, which is the one I know best.

Eight years ago, Parker Road was topping 3,000, and now it’s not. That could be a short-term deficiency as the pay-for-parking program, now disbanded, pushed people to Bush.

Arapaho and Walnut Hill are down a bit, and Park Lane and Mockingbird (where the Red and Blue branch off) are up several hundred.

Since many stations are fed by buses — like the Route 361 I take to Arapaho — changes in the feeder routes can affect ridership.

Now take a look at the Downtown Plano numbers, and think transit-oriented development. Transit sometimes gets some credit for the new shops and many restaurants that have grown near DART’s Downtown Plano station. Yet look at the ridership numbers. They are actually a few hundred riders per day LOWER than they were eight years ago.

Transit-oriented development is a tricky subject, with all kinds of people wanting to take credit for success. I know lots of people who’ve dined in downtown Plano. None of them went by train. Put me in that category.

Maybe the purest example of legitimate ongoing TOD along a DART line — one that benefits ridership — is Brick Row next to DART’s Spring Valley stop in Richardson. Apartments and townhouses have grown right next door, along with some businesses. I saw a 7-Eleven open up there, which can only mean healthy numbers. Meanwhile, you’ll note that DART ridership is up at the station.

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One of the strangest creatures you’ll see downtown is that garish-colored bus with hard-to-read letters emblazoned on the side. No, it doesn’t say “clink.” The curly lower-case letters are trying to spell out “D-Link.”

By day, the buses don’t seem to have many riders. I hollered over to the DART guys for the latest numbers, for your viewing pleasure. You’ll see that ridership seemed off to a slow start but then got a real shot in April. Hmmm. Could it have been Final Four visitors who swelled the ridership? The March Madness Music Festival? That was just one weekend.

Maybe the combination of better weather and familiarity with the route has put more people on the bus.

In any case, I have a tip for DART and other groups with an interest in boosting ridership of this one: Put the word “FREE” all over the darn thing. “D-Link” is cute to the point it’s too cute. The meaning is a puzzle. Don’t puzzle the public. Would-be riders are already worrying whether they have the right change.

Plus, the graphic design makes it look foreign, like the bus originated in Denmark and got lost in Dallas. (“Do you think they accept dollars, Harry?”)

“FREE BUS” is something Americans would relate to. “FREE” is something we understand. “FREE” would get people running for the bus just to get something for nothing. Some of them wouldn’t care where they were headed, just as long as it didn’t cost them anything to get there.

My take on how the Trinity toll road will get built, with the big obstacle being the financing: It will start small and grow over time.

The words “staged” and “scaled” have popped up in conversations about the Trinity project. It’s in the context of getting the $1.3 billion project started despite the fact that the entire cost is out of reach now for the NTTA.

Well, the NTTA typically builds roads in stages. The DNT extension in Collin County consists of just two access roads now, with pay lanes to come when it makes sense. The Chisholm Trail Parkway project in Tarrant and Johnson counties consists of just two pay lanes in its southernmost reaches, to Cleburne. The right-of-way allows for future expansion to six.

Watch for the NTTA and other funders getting the expensive Trinity going the same general way.

The AIA statement centers on revitalizing nearby neighborhoods and fostering density. I take that to mean the AIA supports building new things, which is good for the city. But I ask: Do those neighborhoods not benefit from improving the dysfunctional Lower Stemmons and nearby Canyon — the very reason Dallas City Hall sought the Trinity in the first place? Is the AIA OK with the status quo on downtown’s freeway traffic?

Influential people around town — Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings, for example — have started to beat the drum for a remake of the I-30 corridor east of downtown. Lo and behold, that project now appears on a new list of “key projects” that TxDOT’s Dallas district assembled for briefing to local leaders.

Some projects are already funded and under construction. Some are planned and unfunded. Some are in the early stages of planning, like the I-30 corridor.

TxDOT officials want this project list out there so the public knows what the to-do list looks like. Actually, much of it is more of a wish list, since there’s not nearly enough money for it all.

I saw this list while rooting around for a project update on U.S. 75/Central Expressway, and a few other things popped out at me:

– TxDOT is planning lane and ramp improvements on “Lowest” Stemmons just north of the Horseshoe project improvements. This would run well over $200 million.

– The Southern Gateway project is moving ahead as a possible CDA (private money). Improvements would include adding tolled lanes so single drivers could pay to access the HOVs on I-35 and US 67 in southern Dallas. Public hearing next year on that toll plan.

I’ll join that call: No higher, no wider for Central Expressway in my back yard.

In fact, Richardson deserves the same treatment that Rawlings wants for I-30 in East Dallas. Central Expressway in the northern suburbs should be put where it belonged in the first plan — in a big ditch, with major cross streets going over top, just like the treatment Central got along the Park Cities.

And I’d like a deck park with a band shell and place to park for food trucks, and all that good stuff.

I’d argue that Central should be torn down and traffic forced to surface streets, but we like to stay reality-based in Richardson. :)

NOTE: I asked Hartzel about the ordering of these projects on different lists. In some places fixing I-345 is No. 1, whereas No. 1 is I-35E elsewhere. I-30 is the last one listed on the big map. Pay no mind to the order, Hartzel said.

ANOTHER NOTE: I asked Hartzel why the white paper on I-30 didn’t have the decks the mayor and this newspaper have clamored for. He said not to worry, that planning is early and there’s plenty of time to hear about decks.

The Obama White House is showing its ignorance on how the public boils over about slapping tolls on roads that are free now. We have experience with that in Texas that policy people apparently don’t have inside the Beltway.

That means Obama doesn’t want to advocate the honest way of paying for more roads — raising the gasoline tax for the first time in 20 years. The tax is not pulling its weight today, since cars are more efficient, and the Highway Trust Fund is going broke. Congress is limping along with a soon-to-expire transportation plan that backfills the trust fund with general fund money.

Scrounging around for something more sustainable — and less politically combustible than a tax proposal — the White House does the chicken thing and hatches the idea to let states lay on tolls, if they have the courage.

That’s just handing the locals a stick of political dynamite. We know that in Texas.

One of the things we’ve heard a lot in Texas is that the state should not convert a free road into a toll road. That was a prominent gripe when SH 121 (now the Sam Rayburn Tollway) was being widened and tolled. Planners pointed out that the number of free lanes would, in fact, multiply, with development of the Collin County road, and that toll payers could pay for speed if they wanted.

Still, critics have piped up all across the state as toll roads and toll lanes become common. One prominent statewide group, TURF, and activist Terri Hall have been go-to voices. A lot of critics see a corporate money grab for road profits. The anti-toll fervor is particularly strong in Central Texas.

(In North Texas, we’ve been more docile, probably owing to the fact that we had the “old turnpike” for years joining D and FW, then had the Dallas North Tollway. The NTTA and TxDOT have since criss-crossed the area with toll roads.)

Strong anti-toll sentiment led to passage last year of a bill to ban conversion of free lanes to toll lanes, with some exceptions. It was signed by a governor, Rick Perry, who almost had his political head handed to him a few years back for his expansive Trans-Texas Corridor concept of tollways. He later had TxDOT ban the term from its political lexicon. That’s how touchy tolls can get in this state.

So along comes Obama with his toll-em plan. I’m not sure what latitude Texas would have if the idea got through Congress, considering the new ban adopted by the Legislature, but lawmakers well know that converting roads can be dangerous to political careers.

Many people who have staked out positions on the removal of I-345 have done so without benefit of what’s badly needed in this debate: hard data.

Let’s have a look. I am posting a map displaying data I requested from the North Central Texas Council of Governments. The COG has a database they use to model different transportation scenarios. I asked for data showing origin and destination for vehicles that use I-345 and figures on the directional flow of morning rush hour traffic.

On the morning rush hour, I got the directional flow for I-345 as well as Stemmons, and both are important, because they’re related. Here are the figures, from the council of governments:

What emerges is a picture of a mostly south-to-north commuting rush hour of workers who go beyond downtown for their jobs.

And the map clarifies where those job destinations are — up the Central Expressway corridor as well as up the Stemmons corridor. Transportation planners knew this, but I’m not sure I-345 tearout proponents fully grasped it.

The map might be a surprise to those critic-commenters who insisted to me that southern Dallas workers don’t use I-345 to get up Stemmons. This shows that southern Dallas workers indeed use the freeway link to access jobs up I-35, such as to the hospital district, Love Field, etc.

Stemmons has a bigger concentration of jobs than the CBD, 170,000 workers vs. 135,000, according to figures from the Stemmons Corridor Business Association and Downtown Dallas Inc.

You can see the outbound rush hour there with your own eyes any weekday morning. The reason that some of that traffic gets to Stemmons via I-345 (and Woodall Rodgers) would be the overstuffed Canyon portion of I-30.

And this is precisely why the hypothetical removal of I-345 would push hourly workers to a more expensive commute. The Trinity River toll road is designed as a workaround past downtown congestion for southern Dallas.

Yes, I know that tearout proponents say that using the land for a wave of development would provide thousands of new jobs on the eastern edge of downtown. But that’s speculative. And it’s a matter of speculation about what kind of jobs those possibly are and who possibly gets them.

Clearly, downtown does not provide enough employment today for the southern Dallas workforce.

What’s not speculative is a daily commute for tens of thousands of people who depend on this roadway to drive a few miles for their paychecks.